clothes borrowed from Jewish allegorists, half-Christian Gnostics,
Manicheans, Platonising Christians, and pagan Neoplatonists. We will
now see what St. Dionysius makes of this system, which he accepts as
from the hand of one who has "not only learned, but felt the things of
God.[156]"

The date and nationality of Dionysius are still matters of
dispute.[157] Mysticism changes so little that it is impossible to
determine the question by internal evidence, and for our purposes it
is not of great importance. The author was a monk, perhaps a Syrian
monk: he probably perpetrated a deliberate fraud--a pious fraud, in
his own opinion--by suppressing his own individuality, and fathering
his books on St. Paul's Athenian convert. The success of the imposture
is amazing, even in that uncritical age, and gives much food for
reflection. The sixth century saw nothing impossible in a book
full of the later Neoplatonic theories--those of Proclus rather
than Plotinus[158]--having been written in the first century.
And the mediæval Church was ready to believe that this strange
semi-pantheistic Mysticism dropped from the lips of St. Paul.[159]

Dionysius is a theologian, not a visionary like his master Hierotheus.
His main object is to present Christianity in the guise of a Platonic
mysteriosophy, and he uses the technical terms of the mysteries
whenever he can.[160] His philosophy is that of his day--the later
Neoplatonism, with its strong Oriental affinities.

Beginning with the Trinity, he identifies God the Father with the
Neoplatonic Monad, and describes Him as "superessential
Indetermination," "super-rational Unity," "the Unity which unifies
every unity," "superessential Essence," "irrational Mind," "unspoken